There’s tension in the bitcoin community – it’s never been this bad. There’s drama. Good developers like Mike Hearn are leaving the community, although his writing the cryptocurrency off was not the best thing to do. But let’s discuss why this is happening at all.

So, all the actors involved in the current crisis want bitcoins to succeed. More importantly, they want it to scale – they want the cryptocurrency’s capabilities to increase. When bitcoin was launched in 2008, scale wasn’t on anyone’s mind because it was a fascinating new experiment and everyone knew there’d be a lot of kinks to iron out. When Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of the experiment, wrote the code that’d implement bitcoins, he imposed an arbitrary cap of 1 MB on a block. A block is the nuclear unit of the blockchain that determines how much computing capacity is available to verify transactions. And the block size stayed that way because the people participating in the experiment didn’t expect it to become a problem. Plus, you could do a lot with 1 MB.